The Muslim Brotherhood (22 page)

Needless to say, the MAB became increasingly keen to distance itself from the Brotherhood in recent years. Its leader, the Somali Ikhwani Ahmed Sheikh, has categorically stated that the MAB is not part of the formal structure of the international Muslim Brotherhood.
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He has also said ‘our only link with the Egyptians is understanding. We co-ordinate over some activities.’
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The official line of the MAB is as follows:

The MAB enjoys good relations with every mainstream Islamic organisation in the UK and abroad. Among them is Muslim Brotherhood which is well respected not only by
the common people on the street throughout the Arab and Muslim countries but also by politicians, intellectuals and opinion-makers in most Arab countries … MAB reserves the right to be proud of the humane notions and principles of the Muslim Brotherhood, who has proven to be an inspiration to Muslims, Arab and otherwise for many decades. We also reserve the right to disagree with or divert from the opinion and line of the Muslim Brotherhood, or any other organisation, Muslim or otherwise on any issue at hand.
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Nonetheless, it is undeniable that most of the senior leadership of the MAB are or were at one stage heavily involved in the Ikhwan. Aside from Helbawy, Azzam Tamimi was active in Jordan within the Brotherhood and the Islamic Action Front.
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Anas Tikriti, meanwhile, came from a family associated with the Ikhwan, given that his father Osama was head of the Iraqi branch of the Brotherhood.

The MAB may appear to be independent from the structures of the Muslim Brotherhood but the informal linkages are undeniable. Moreover, some figures within the MAB still consider themselves part of the Brotherhood movement. One young member of the MAB, Jamal el-Shayyal, who spoke on behalf of the organisation at the Stop the War Coalition conference on 11 January 2003, stated that his organisation was proud to be affiliated with the Brotherhood.
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He went on to explain during an interview with
The Weekly Worker
magazine: ‘As the Muslim Brotherhood, we have never seen a Muslim state … Officially, we emerged in the mid-1990s. Every single Muslim organisation in Britain – apart from three – was set up under the influence of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. We have gone from strength to strength.”
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Such ambiguity does little to assuage suspicions about the MAB and its links to the Brotherhood.

Like the UOIF, the MAB has been keen in recent years to promote a more Europeanised version of Islam, one that fits with being a minority
community. Ahmed Sheikh supports the view that a new
fiqh
(school of Islamic jurisprudence) is required specifically for Muslims living in the West.
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They have also sought to work as a lobby group engaging in local politics. The MAB channelled huge efforts into opposing the UK’s role in the Iraqi invasion of 2003 and in 2004 it called on Muslims in Britain to vote only for candidates from parties that had steadfastly opposed the invasion of Iraq or any British military involvement there.
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Yet it clearly advocated that Muslims participate in the electoral process. The MAB also threw its weight behind the former leftist London mayor Ken Livingstone, who controversially hosted Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in London. In addition it worked closely with non-Muslim organisations such as the left-wing Stop the War Coalition to organise anti-war demonstrations.

Yet whilst the Ikhwan in Britain may, through organisations such as the MAB, have found a stronger political voice in recent years, it remains a small group with very limited influence over Britain’s Muslim communities. This is partly because many of the Ikhwani who came to Britain were students or refugees and the group was never able to spread beyond the elite. Nor has the Arab community in Britain been as settled as the South Asians who, like the North Africans in France, came
en masse
in response to demands for labour and settled into their own communities. For these reasons, organisations such as the MAB have not yet garnered any real grass roots support, leaving them largely irrelevant to the UK’s vibrant Islamist scene.

As in the UK, the first Ikhwani activity in Germany was begun in the 1950s by students from the Arab world. However, the first Ikhwani to establish a real base for the movement in Germany was Said Ramadan, who oversaw the building of a mosque and Islamic centre
in Munich. The idea for the mosque did not come from Ramadan or the Brotherhood. The project was initiated by a group of Muslims who had fought with Germany against the Russians in the Second World War. They were led by Nurredine Nakibhodscha Namangani, an Uzbek who had been an imam for one of Hitler’s SS divisions, and they also had German backing for their plan. Then a group of Ikhwani students in Munich heard about the project and called in Said Ramadan. One of these brothers, Mohamed Ali al-Mahgary, referred to Ramadan as ‘a gifted orator’, noting, ‘we all respected him’.
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Ramadan was quick to seize the opportunity to take over the mosque building commission in a bid to oust Namangani, whose traditionalist Turkic Islam was anathema to the purist Islam promoted by the Ikhwan. Ramadan was in a charmed position thanks to his generous supply of Saudi wealth; he was able to contribute an initial 1,000 marks to the mosque building commission, far outweighing the contributions of the other interested parties.
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As part of his strategy to dominate Islamist activism in Germany, in 1959 Ramadan also organised a European Muslim Congress in Munich. The following year he took over full control of the mosque construction committee, completely sidelining Namangani.

The mosque, which was given tax-exempt status by the West German government, was finally opened in 1973, reportedly with the help of generous contributions from Saudi Arabia. When the mosque opened, the building commission changed its name to the Islamic Community of Southern Germany, indicating its desire to extend its influence beyond the city of Munich. By this time, however, Ramadan had left Munich and the running of the mosque and organisation had been given to the Syrian Ikhwani Ghaleb Himmat. Himmat had come to Germany as a student and had little interest in what was going on inside the country.

Under Himmat’s stewardship, the Munich mosque became a key centre for Ikhwani activity. This was not the only Brotherhood centre in Germany at this time. The town of Aachen, also known as
Aix-la-Chapelle, had also become an important Ikhwani hub on account of the fact that it was home to Issam al-Attar. Al-Attar had tried to lead the Syrian organisation from his exile, but the impracticality of such a venture, added to the fact that he was embroiled in a deep conflict over the leadership of the Syrian Ikhwan, resulted in his breaking away to form his own organisation, al-Talia, which was focused on activities in Europe. By the time he settled in Aachen, al-Attar had come to represent a new current of thinking that was similar to the Ikhwan’s ideology but was largely independent from the Brotherhood. As such he only had the support of a minority of Syrian Ikhwani from the smaller and more moderate Damascus wing. Suggestions by some commentators that, ‘while the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood has chosen Munich as its base of operations in Germany, its Syrian branch is headquartered in Aachen, a German town near the Dutch border’,
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are therefore somewhat misplaced.

However, the Bilal mosque in Aachen developed as a magnet for Islamic activism and for other Syrian Ikhwani who had fled repression. West Germany was an important place of refuge and its hostility to the Soviet Union during the Cold War meant that it was ever ready to open its doors to refugees from Arab nationalist countries that had aligned themselves with the Soviet camp. Other Syrians who joined al-Attar in Aachen included Mohamed al-Hawari, who was also part of the sidelined Damascus group and who is now a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research. The daughter of the late Dr Hassan al-Huwaidi also resides in Aachen with her family and so Aachen was al-Huwaidi’s base during his many European visits.

However, the main centre of organised Ikhwani activity continued to be Munich. In 1981, still under Himmat’s leadership, the Islamic Community of Southern Germany changed its name to the
Islamische Gemeinschaft Deutschland
(The Islamic Community of Germany, IGD), marking its territory over the whole country. The city drew many of the most important Ikhwani of the time. Mashour made several
visits there after he fled Egypt in the early 1980s. The former Supreme Guide, Mehdi Akef, also spent time at the Munich centre. According to Egyptian intellectual Rifat Said, he was in Munich to mobilise the international
tanzeem
and control its financial flows.
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The Egyptian leader, who had been part of the Nizam al-Khass, was based at the centre between 1984 and 1987.

Being in Munich was a very pioneering experience and I used to deal with the German government in a very advanced way. There were some sensitive issues and I solved them with them because I felt they were well advanced in their thinking … I used to have a conference every month in the mosque attended by thousands of Muslims from all parts of Germany. The mosque was at the entrance to the gate of an island and the inhabitants of that island complained. How did the government behave? They gave me a forest and cut down the trees and said this is yours.
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To give an indication of how important a base Munich was at that time, Akef has explained that whilst he was there statesmen from across the Muslim world visited the mosque to pay their respects to the world’s most powerful Islamic organisation.
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He also says that the Ikhwan sought to bring the various Muslim organisations under its banner: ‘In Germany, when I lived there for a while, all our task was to unite the Muslims because there were different groups so we could be one representative to deal with the government.’
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Evidently, Germany was a key centre for the Ikhwan, although its importance rested not so much on its ability to attract the community, which after all was limited, but rather on the presence of important personnel, some of whom had access to money. Himmat was a successful businessman and the Deputy of the Al-Taqwa bank. The bank’s head, Youssef Nada, was also on the council of the Munich mosque. The city
became a kind of backroom powerhouse for the Ikhwan in the Arab world, where the Brothers could move around freely, use the Western media and presumably facilitate their financial operations.

The events of 9/11 would change this situation. Although the IGD allegedly came under greater scrutiny by the German intelligence services in the late 1990s, it was only really after the attacks on the US that the organisation was really put under the spotlight. Shortly after the attacks, an investigation was launched into the Al-Taqwa bank, which the US accused of indirectly providing financial investment services to al-Qa‘ida. Himmat’s assets were frozen, forcing him to step down from his position as head of the IGD in 2002.

Himmat’s post was taken over by Ibrahim El-Zayat, who continues to run the IGD today. El-Zayat is a German national of Egyptian origin with an Egyptian father and a German mother. In spite of his relative youth, he has long been involved in Islamic work and comes from a religious family with a history of Islamic activism.

His father, Farouk El-Zayat, is the imam of the mosque in Marburg, near Cologne, and his brother Bilal, a doctor, and both his sisters are all involved in Islamic work. He is alleged to be the nephew of the famous Egyptian Islamist lawyer Muntassir el-Zayat, who was a member of al-Jama’at al-Islamiya.
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He married within the Islamic community and his wife is Sabiha Erbakan, a niece of the Turkish Islamist leader Necmettin Erbakan. She is involved in the Centre for Islamic Women’s Studies at the UOIF’s Institute for Human Sciences in Paris.
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El-Zayat’s sister is married to one of Kamal Helbawy’s sons. El-Zayat’s background is therefore clearly deeply enmeshed in the reformist Islamist tradition.

El-Zayat’s professional career is also a typical mix of Ikhwani-style Gulf-backed Islamic activism. He was head of the Muslim Students Association in Germany and co-founder of the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations (FEMYSO), of which he was chairman from 1996 to 2002. In 1997 he became the head of
the Islamic Centre in Cologne. He is on the board of Islamic Relief and a trustee of Islamic Relief in Birmingham.
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In addition he was the European representative of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) and worked in the Islamic Council in Germany which is part of the Saudi Islamic World League. He is also linked into Ikhwani-oriented networks in France, being one of the trustees of the UOIF’s school for imams at Château-Chinon.

While El-Zayat is personally very active, the IGD has never been able to attract large numbers of members either prior to or during his leadership. Although it is able to draw a sizeable congregation to its mosques, as El-Zayat notes himself, ‘It is a body which has a very very limited membership.’
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The very fact that the whole organisation shifted its headquarters from Munich to Cologne when El-Zayat took up the post is an indication of the group’s limited influence. El-Zayat also acknowledges that when the IGD elects its Shura Council, the choice of who to elect is restricted because the number of qualified people is so small. This is partly because like most of the European Islamic organisations that follow the Ikhwani school of thought, the IGD is primarily an elitist group. It is also because, like the MSS and the MAB in Britain, the IGD has had to struggle against other Islamic currents. Given that the vast majority of Muslims living in Germany are Turkish, the Turkish organisations have always wielded the greatest influence and achieved stronger grass roots support. Where the IGD has only 600 recorded members and between thirty and forty Islamic cultural centres and places of worship, its Turkish counterpart, Millî Görüş, only one of a number of Turkish Islamic associations, has 26,500 members and between 400 and 600 cultural centres or places of worship.
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